Middlesbrough’s Pineapple Black continue to lead the charge when it comes to supporting early career practitioners and outsider artists. Their fourth annual open call exhibition runs from Friday 11th August-Saturday 9th September and will be a large scale group exhibition which connects artists of all backgrounds, ages and levels of experience to provide an intriguing cross-section of Tees-affiliated talent.
We had a chat with gallery owner, curator and artist, Bobby Benjamin.
Tell us about Pineapple Black
Pineapple Black is an independent, unfunded art space in Middlesbrough comprising three gallery/project spaces, two bars, a community hub and artist studios. While art is the focus, Pineapple Black aims to be more than just a gallery and acts as a safe and accessible space for the wider creative community and beyond. Whether it’s an art exhibition, live music, catwalk shows, comedy, book clubs, Queer yoga or a 26 piece orchestra – you can find it all at Pineapple Black. This project aims to make art and creativity to accessible to all and works hard to identify and remove barriers; from setting up a bouncy castle in the middle of an exhibition to encouraging parents to interact with the space to staging deaf-friendly gigs, Pineapple Black is always looking to reshape what a gallery or art space can, and should be.
Why do you think Middlesbrough has so many independent arts spaces?
There are so many galleries in Middlesbrough and the number seems to continue to grow, as does the number of people accessing them, which is great! The town’s portfolio includes institutions, NPOs, independent spaces, pop-ups and more, giving creatives in the area tangible routes to exhibition and a career in the arts. This coupled with the SACI School at Teesside Uni and the Northern School of Art makes Middlesbrough a fantastic proposition for an emerging or established creative. There’s a real sense of collaboration here too – everyone mucks in and helps each other out. I run one gallery, work at another, and have exhibited at all the rest. We support each other’s programmes, attend each other’s events and help each other out all the time – it’s a really beautiful thing, but also a very Northern thing too.
This was an industrial town of a rich heritage and a storied past, but when its industrial future was mothballed the town was left with something of an identity crisis. And, as happens throughout art history, while the town struggled, artists moved in to the abandoned buildings and forgotten corners of the town and start to reshape its future, forging a new identity as a creative area. You only have to go back 15 years and there was no MIMA, Auxiliary, Platform A, Pineapple Black, The Masham, 2B… and the list goes on. Here, our past was forged from industry but our future is coloured by creativity, and I love that about the Boro.
